Melvin Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Transportation within the Built Environment school at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on transportation engineering, machine learning applications in urban mobility, reinforcement learning for traffic systems, and sustainable transportation solutions. He utilizes advanced computational methods including graph neural networks, generative AI, and physics-informed models to address challenges in traffic prediction, electric vehicle infrastructure, and urban design. His research interests encompass transportation optimization, spatiotemporal modeling, generative design methods, and behavioral analysis in urban systems. Recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on AI-driven solutions for traffic management, battery-swapping systems, and multimodal design optimization. Dr. Wong has received recognition including the Best Research Paper Award (2024) and Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship (2020). He contributes to academic activities through conference presentations, peer reviews, and course development in urban mobility and big data analytics.
Christopher Hojny is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Eindhoven University of Technology , specializing in combinatorial optimization. He contributes to the EAISI Foundational group and co-develops the academic solver SCIP . His research focuses on symmetry handling in mixed-integer programming , theoretical properties of integer programs, and algorithm development for combinatorial optimization. Recent work explores applications in graph neural network verification , clustering problems, and network coding through mixed-integer programming frameworks. Key publication trends show expertise in Symmetry detection and mitigation techniques Relaxation complexity theory Applications to machine learning robustness Decision diagram-based scheduling Scientific contributions include Proof systems for symmetry certification Topological bounds tightening in GNNs Stable set problem symmetry handling SCIP solver extensions He supervises PhD students Cédric Roy (NWO project on Local Symmetries) and Sten Wessel (co-supervised with Frits Spieksma), while Jasper van Doornmalen (2019-2023) investigated symmetry propagation algorithms.
Prof. dr. Lambert Schomaker is a Full Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen, leading the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE) institute within the Faculty of Science and Engineering. His work spans perceptual intelligence, machine learning, and neuromorphic computing, with significant contributions to handwriting recognition, robotics, and historical document analysis. Affiliations: Bernoulli Institute, CogniGron (Cognitive Systems & Materials), and Data Science & Systems Complexity (DSSC) centers. Education: M.Sc. (1983) and Ph.D. (1991) in Psychophysiology/Psychology from Nijmegen University. Research Interests: AI, pattern recognition, neural networks, autonomous systems, and applications in cultural heritage (e.g., the MONK system for handwritten archive indexing). He has pioneered handwriting recognition methods used in modern devices like tablets and led the 30MEuro Target project for large-scale data mining. Grants & Projects: Includes NWO-funded initiatives (e.g., Catch, TriGraph) and EU projects (MANTIS, MANIC). Current focus areas include neuromorphic computing with electronic materials and AI-driven analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Awards: IBM Faculty Awards (2011, 2012), IAPR Best Paper Award (2012), Ching Yee Suen Special Award (2012). Advising: Supervised over 20 PhD students in AI, robotics, and document analysis. Active in industry collaborations (e.g., HP, Microsoft). Labs/Teams: Director of ALICE, contributor to CogniGron, and leader of the MONK system team. Current research includes neuromorphic hardware development and AI applications in maintenance systems.
Josien Pluim is a Full Professor of Medical Image Analysis at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where she leads the Medical Image Analysis group and serves as vice-dean of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She also holds a part-time professorship at the University Medical Center Utrecht. Her research is centered at the intersection of artificial intelligence and clinical medicine, with strong affiliations to EAISI (Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute) and the EAISI Health initiative. Her academic background includes a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Groningen (1996), specializing in Scientific Computing and Imaging, followed by a PhD (2001) from the Image Sciences Institute at UMC Utrecht on multimodality image registration using mutual information. She advanced from assistant to associate professor at UMC Utrecht before joining TU/e as a Full Professor in 2014, with a concurrent part-time appointment at UMC Utrecht since 2015. Pluim’s research interests span medical image analysis, including image registration, segmentation, detection, and deep learning, with clinical applications in neurology and oncology. She investigates both methodological development and real-world clinical translation. Recent work emphasizes generative AI for synthetic data, robustness in deep learning models, and super-resolution techniques for brain MRI. Her publications reveal a strong trend toward addressing data scarcity, generalization, and evaluation in medical AI, particularly through simulation and diffusion models. She has co-authored over 250 peer-reviewed papers and is recognized with prestigious fellowships: Fellow of the MICCAI Society IEEE Fellow Pluim has served in leadership roles across the academic community, including Associate Editor for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging , IEEE TBME , and Medical Image Analysis . She has chaired major conferences like WBIR 2006 and MICCAI 2010, and served on the Executive Board of the MICCAI Society. She actively supervises research and educational projects, including team challenges and capstone courses in medical image analysis. Her group is involved in significant collaborative research, such as the EU-funded openGTN project, which supports PhD training in generative models for medical imaging. She also contributes to scientific advisory boards, including the Hanarth Fonds.
Wouter van Toll is a Lecturer at the Academy for AI, Games & Media, specializing in crowd simulation and real-time systems. His research focuses on path planning, crowd behavior modeling, and fluid dynamics in agent-based simulations. He has contributed to advancing algorithms for microscopic crowd simulation and integrating techniques like Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) to handle extreme crowd densities. Key research interests include sketch-based interaction design for steering behaviors, navigation mesh optimization, and topological strategies for agent coordination. His work bridges computational methods with creative applications in game development and artificial intelligence. Received Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (2022) for his work on sketch-based steering behaviors in crowd simulation. Active collaborations in Europe and North America, particularly in crowd simulation software development. Publications span algorithmic advancements in crowd simulation, navigation systems, and interdisciplinary applications combining physics-based methods with agent-based models. Current research emphasizes real-time simulation efficiency and human-centered design tools for behavior specification.
Hendrik Baier is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where he joined in 2022. His research focuses on creating agents capable of succeeding in complex decision-making tasks to help human users solve real-world problems. His work spans planning for long-term goals, learning in unknown environments, and explainability of AI systems for effective human-AI interaction. Dr. Baier's research interests center on planning and search algorithms, reinforcement learning, and explainable AI systems. His work investigates how AI can think ahead and explain its reasoning process, particularly in sequential decision-making contexts. He applies these techniques to practical domains including logistics and transportation, smart manufacturing, and sustainable energy systems. His research bridges theoretical foundations with real-world applications through collaborative projects with industry partners. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong focus on explainability in sequential decision-making, with increasing integration of large language models to enhance traditional planning algorithms. His work spans theoretical foundations of Monte Carlo Tree Search, programmatic policy generation, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and practical applications of these techniques. A notable trend is the growing emphasis on human-AI collaboration, where AI systems must not only perform well but also effectively communicate their reasoning to human users. Dr. Baier actively collaborates with researchers across multiple institutions, including CWI Amsterdam where he maintains an affiliation, and has participated in significant interdisciplinary efforts such as the Dagstuhl Seminar on Explainable AI for Sequential Decision Making. His research group at TU/e works closely with industry partners to translate fundamental research into practical applications. He is affiliated with EAISI (Eindhoven Artificial Intelligence Systems Institute) and contributes to the Decision Making with Artificial Intelligence educational program at TU/e. His laboratory work focuses on developing benchmark environments and frameworks that enable rigorous evaluation of decision-making algorithms, with recent contributions including MOMAland for multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning.
Daniel Braun is a Researcher at the Digital Society Institute , affiliated with Technical University of Munich . His work bridges Artificial Intelligence , Natural Language Processing , and LegalTech , focusing on automated legal assessment of contracts, ethical dimensions of AI, and consumer protection in the digital era. Education: Bachelor in Artificial Intelligence at Saarland University PhD in Automated Semantic Analysis, Legal Assessment, and Summarization of Standard Form Contracts at Technical University of Munich Master in Creating Textual Driver Feedback from Telemetric Data at University of Aberdeen Research Interests revolve around applying NLP to legal and engineering domains. Key areas include machine learning for contract analysis , ethical AI frameworks , and consumer protection through automated systems . His recent work explores adversarial attacks on text detectors, lexical alignment in chatbots, and robustness in generative AI detection. Publications (2024-2025) highlight advancements in German consumer contract analysis , disagreement handling in legal datasets , and regulatory debates around AI . Notable outputs include the AGB-DE corpus and studies on black-box neural text detectors . Technical Expertise spans data mining , process mining , and domain-specific NLP . He has contributed to smart contract analysis , conversational AI , and language models for engineering and legal contexts .
Dr. V. Menkovski serves as an Associate Professor in Data Mining at Eindhoven University of Technology's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He also holds associate professor positions with EAISI Health and EAISI High Tech Systems, and is an ICMS Affiliated member. His work spans multiple domains of artificial intelligence and computational physics, with significant contributions to fusion energy research. Mathematics and Computer Science, Data Mining (Primary Appointment) EAISI Health (Associate Professor) EAISI High Tech Systems (Associate Professor) ICMS (Affiliated Member) Menkovski's research focuses on Graph Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and their applications in diverse fields from plasma physics to metamaterials. His work demonstrates strong interdisciplinary connections, particularly between computer science and fusion energy research. He has developed novel approaches for crowd simulation, tokamak plasma monitoring, and metamaterials homogenization using advanced neural architectures. His fingerprint reveals expertise in Quality-of-Experience, Autoencoders, Neural Networks, Annotation, Graph Neural Networks, Video Streaming, Adversarial Machine Learning, and Anomaly Detection. Analysis of his recent publications (2023-2025) shows a clear trend toward applying Graph Neural Networks to complex physical systems, particularly in fusion energy research and materials science. His work increasingly integrates symmetry principles with neural architectures, as seen in his research on equivariant networks for metamaterials and symmetry-informed networks for zeolite analysis. There's also significant focus on practical applications in fake news detection, anomaly detection, and plasma state monitoring. Best Paper Award ICPM 2021 (with Sommers and Fahland) Best Paper Award of LoG 2022 (with multiple co-authors including Huang, Chen, Fang, Zhao, Yin, Pei, Mocanu, Wang, Pechenizkiy, and Liu) Menkovski teaches several advanced courses including Deep Learning, Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence, and Sociophysics 2, which runs through August 2025. His supervised work portfolio includes 79 projects, indicating substantial mentorship activity. He has received significant media attention for his research, including coverage by 11 news outlets, blog posts, and mentions on social media platforms. His work on 'Supervised Learning of Process Discovery Techniques Using Graph Neural Networks' was particularly noted in media coverage. His research involves collaboration with multiple institutions and teams, particularly in fusion energy research (Eurofusion Tokamak Exploitation Team, ASDEX-Upgrade team, EUROfusion MST1 Team). He works closely with researchers across disciplines, including physicists working on tokamak plasma and materials scientists studying metamaterials and zeolites.
Prof. Antske Fokkens is a Full Professor in Computational Linguistic Methods at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with joint appointments in the Faculty of Humanities and the Network Institute. She directs the Text Mining/Language and AI track in the Linguistics Master's program and serves as Vice Dean of Research. Her research investigates methodological aspects of computational linguistics, focusing on language models, interpretable AI, and digital humanities. She develops tools to extract patterns from large text corpora for applications in social science and history, emphasizing transparency and interdisciplinary collaboration. Current projects include analyzing perspective expression in media and semantic modeling for biographical data. Recent publications examine shortcut learning in text classification, persona-driven content generation, hate speech model alignment, and cross-disciplinary approaches to stance detection. Her work integrates NLP with social science theories to analyze discourse on sustainability, polarization, and media framing.
Dr. A.A.A. Qahtan is an Assistant Professor in the Data Intensive Systems research group within the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University's Faculty of Science. His academic appointment focuses on advancing research and education in data-intensive computing with particular expertise in data stream mining, data cleaning, and explainability of machine learning techniques. Dr. Qahtan completed his PhD studies at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) under the supervision of Xiangliang Zhang and Soujin Wang. Prior to joining Utrecht University, he worked as a postdoc at QCRI (Qatar Computing Research Institute) where he developed pattern functional dependencies (PFDs) for data cleaning. His research spans several critical areas in data science: Data Stream Mining and Real-time Processing Data Cleaning and Quality Assessment Pattern Recognition and Functional Dependencies Outlier and Anomaly Detection Concept Drift Detection in Streaming Data Fairness in Machine Learning Systems Missing Data Imputation Techniques Dr. Qahtan's publication record demonstrates consistent contributions to top-tier venues including PVLDB, KDD, ICDE, and SIGMOD. His recent work shows a progression from foundational data cleaning techniques to advanced applications in categorical data analysis, fairness in AI, and cryptocurrency market analysis. His research bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications across multiple domains. Dr. Qahtan actively contributes to academic education at Utrecht University, teaching courses including Data Analytics, Data Science and Society, Data Wrangling and Data Analysis, and Databases across multiple academic years from 2019 to 2024.
Fons van der Sommen is an Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, specializing in Video Coding & Architectures. He leads research on computer-aided detection systems for early cancer diagnosis, particularly focusing on esophageal and colorectal neoplasia through advanced AI and computer vision techniques. His research interests span medical image analysis, AI-assisted diagnostics, and developing robust systems for clinical deployment. Recent publications focus on overcoming real-world implementation challenges of AI in endoscopy and enhancing the trustworthiness of diagnostic systems. Recent research trends show strong emphasis on surgical AI applications (robot-assisted procedures), generative models for medical data augmentation, and quality assurance frameworks for clinical AI deployment. His work integrates deep learning with clinical validation across gastrointestinal and pulmonary oncology. TU/e Best PhD Thesis Award (2018) Best Poster Presentation (2017, 2013) He coordinates multiple research projects including TASTI-XECS221002 (Advanced AR for AI-based Servitization) and XL-ARGOS (extended reality solutions). Manages collaborations with medical centers on AI implementation for cancer screening.
Prof. Dr. Ilker Birbil is a Professor of AI & Optimization Techniques for Business & Society at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), affiliated with the Amsterdam Business School's Business Analytics section. He previously held professorships at Erasmus University and Sabancı University, focusing on optimization and data science. His research interests include interpretable machine learning, data privacy, and optimization methods in decision-making. Education: PhD in Operations Research from North Carolina State University Postdoc at Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), Netherlands Research Interests: Optimization in data science, interpretable AI, privacy-preserving algorithms, and decision-making systems. Recent work focuses on differentially private optimization and meta-learning techniques like LESS. Key Achievements: Recipient of multiple teaching awards at Sabancı University Affiliated researcher at OPTIMAL (Optimization for and with Machine Learning) Organized workshops on ML for optimization and mathematics of ML Grants & Teams: Leads the UvA group on Optimization and Machine Learning at LNMB. Collaborates on projects blending OR and ML, including privacy-aware algorithms and revenue management systems. Labs/Teams: OPTIMAL, UvA Optimization Group, and interdisciplinary teams in data analytics.
Tommaso Caselli is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen, specializing in Computational Linguistics. His work focuses on advanced NLP techniques including event extraction, storyline analysis, sentiment detection, and generative AI applications. He leads the 'AI and Language' theme at the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society and contributes to initiatives like the Dutch Abusive Language Corpus (DALC) and the Event Storyline Corpus (ESC). His research addresses societal challenges such as climate communication, misinformation detection, and ethical AI use. Caselli has received awards for his contributions to NLP, including the Outstanding Area Chair (2023) and Best Paper Awards at COLING 2022. His recent projects explore generative AI's potentials and risks in healthcare and social media contexts. Affiliations: Faculty of Arts, Computational Linguistics Department, University of Groningen External Roles: Theme Coordinator (Jantina Tammes School), Former Board Member (Senso Comune) Research Interests: Event processing, temporal reasoning, causal relation extraction, abusive language detection, and the societal impact of NLP technologies. His work intersects with UN Sustainable Development Goals related to climate action and responsible innovation. Key Contributions: Developed benchmark corpora like EXCEPTIUS for legal texts analysis and TEXT-CAKE for evaluating language models. Active in CLEF labs (CheckThat!) addressing misinformation and check-worthiness detection. Supervised datasets such as the Dutch Abusive Language Corpus and the Content Type Dataset. Awards & Recognition: Recipient of multiple academic accolades including Outstanding Paper Awards (2022-2023), Best Student Paper (2022), and leadership in organizing NLP workshops (e.g., CLEF, CASE).
Dr. Luuk Spreeuwers is an Associate Professor specializing in Datamanagement & Biometrics , with a focus on Artificial Intelligence , Computer Vision , and Machine Learning . His research spans biometric security, face recognition, morphing attacks, and finger vein verification, resulting in over 255 publications and 10 years of active research contributions. He has collaboratively developed datasets like Orchid Flowers Dataset and FLUXSynID , advancing AI applications in biology and forensic science. Research Interests: Face recognition, biometric security, deep learning, morphing attack detection, finger vein biometrics, explainable AI, and historical image analysis. Scientific Awards: Best Paper Award (BIOSIG 2017), Best Poster Award (BIOSIG 2014), Educational Award of Electrical Engineering (2018). Activities: Organized SITB 2025 and IWBF 2024 conferences; delivered invited talks on face recognition and forensic applications; serves as Editor-in-Chief of IET Image Processing . Article Trends highlight his work on: deep learning for biometric security, forensic face recognition, morphing attack detection frameworks, finger vein pattern analysis, and robustness testing in AI systems.
J. Huang is a faculty member at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science at Delft University of Technology . Their research is centered on federated learning , cybersecurity , and distributed systems , with a strong emphasis on defending against adversarial attacks and ensuring robustness in decentralized machine learning environments. Research Interests: Federated Learning and Distributed AI Adversarial Attacks and Defenses Data Poisoning and Model Robustness Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Trustworthy and Secure AI Systems Recent publications reflect a deep engagement with security challenges in federated learning , including gradient inversion attacks, model poisoning without data access, and optimizing client selection strategies. These works contribute to advancing the reliability and safety of distributed AI systems. Scientific Contributions: While no explicit awards are listed, the high citation counts and peer-reviewed contributions in top-tier venues like FC, SRDS, DSN, and PAKDD demonstrate significant academic impact. Collaborations: Huang collaborates with researchers such as Z. Zhao, L.Y. Chen, S. Roos, C. Hong, and others, indicating a strong international research network, particularly within Europe and Asia.
